The Flow of Consciousness

I’m a Tekken guy: am now and always have been. I never really got into other mainstream fighting games, such as Battle Arena Toshinden, Virtua Fighter, Dead or Alive, or Street Fighter. I did enjoy Mortal Kombat back in the day. I picked up Street Fighter IV at the behest of Shawn Wall and may even pick up Super Street Fighter IV when it comes out.

Kazuya Mishima

However, my true love is Tekken 2. Sure, the character stories are hilariously trite and the graphics of this PS1 game simply can’t compete with the visual feast that is Tekken 6.

Brigette and I bought the game from PSN shortly after I investigated and got a PS3 for Christmas. We’ve been playing for a few hours here and there, unlocking characters and enjoying playing a 15 year old game on a modern system.

Until last night, we hadn’t yet unlocked Kazuya, the villain of the game. Every site on the web says that one must beat the game undefeated (i.e., not using any continues) with a sub-boss character (e.g. Lee, Kuma, Wang, and the other unlockable characters). However, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Kazuya in Tekken 2

I tried for hours with Kuma, getting up to Stage 6 or 7 before being defeated. We were using single bout, 20 second rounds to do it—by "we", I mean Brigette and I switching off as our fingers got tired. We moved to Lee and got up to Stage 8, but couldn’t get past that fight. Eventually, I switched to Baek and really made some progress, getting to Kazyua on Stage 9 several times. During this, we switched to double bouts. This gave us an extra chance to learn from our mistakes and likely saved us time because we didn’t have to go back to Stage 1 every time we lost. Brigette took the controller at one point and switched back to Lee.

Finally, Brigette defeated Kazuya and moved on to the last fight against Devil. After a 19 second round, Devil offed her with his cheesy flyer laser beam eye attack. Frustrated, she almost reset the game. I kinda wanted to see Lee’s ending, so I urged her to fight Devil one more time. She defeated him handedly that round, a K.O. in ~10 seconds.

Disappointed, we continued trying to unlock Kazuya. About 20 minutes later, Brigette accidentally flipped too far in the character selection screen and realized that Kazuya was available!

It appears that one must only be undefeated through Kazuya in order to unlock him. After that, simply finish the game by defeating Devil. Apparently continuing on Devil doesn’t break the unlock.

If this works for you, please let me know. I can’t easily reproduce it myself.